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Introduction

Tizio Lamp by Richard Sapper – Own work, CC BY 3.

The first task given to the first year at DJCAD was to make a replica out of cardboard, foam and other modelling material of a Tizio Lamp. the Tizio Lamp was created by Richard Sapper in 1972 for Artemide and is renowned for its counterweight system, its lack of wires and its halogen bulb which was previously mostly used in the automotive industry.

Development

Support Beam

The team I was working with started planning the lamp in detail to know which part to create first. We decided to create the base first as it is key point of the lamp. The base had been weighted so that the rest of the lamp could stand on top of it. As the base was being made another group within our team worked on making the first legs/support beam of the lamp. The two beams fitted in a slot made in the base, The base was then covered in a piece of paper to make it look nicer.

Initial frame

The next step was making the other support beams, this was done at the same time by 2 different teams within the group. At the same time this was happening, another person in our group was making the lampshade. When the beams were done, we assembled the lamp without the lampshade as it would provide too much weight for initial testings.

Testing weigths

We then made weights using initially only cardboard but as we found out, it was not heavy enough and thus we added coins of 1&2 pennies to add some weight discretely. Eventually, we managed to make it work. Unfortunatelly we had forgotten about the weight that the lampshade would bring, making the effort of this step rather futile in the long term.

Using tape as weights

We then place the lampshade on the frame of the lamp and the weight system didn’t hold up due to the fact that the lampshade was too heavy, we attempetd to add more coins but that was in vain as we did not have enough of them. We then proceeded to use rocks as weights in the lamp and that didn’t work either so we eventually used tape to make the whole lamp work.

Final Project

Eventually we came to realise that we could use both the rocks and the coins which would minimise the amount of space the weights would take enabling the lamp to fold unto itself once more, we also realised that we could make the lamp perfectly accurate to the original model but we settled with function over aesthectics.

Thoughts and Improvements

We learned many things from this task. We worked well as a team as each person always did something different during the project and no two people clashed on a piece they were both working on. We also learned that despite the lamp having a simplistic look it was still challeging to recreate it as the counterweight system is a complex system. But in the end, a quite succesfull model was created as per the execption of the addition of the weight pouch. Overall I would deem the recreation of the lamp a success but it could be improved.